Pour le Mérite

I have, rather late in life, got around to reading Ernst Jünger's 'Storm of Steel'. As a young person I read Sassoon, Graves and, in a rather different vein, Hašek. Got around to Blunden much more recently, more or less by accident. Perhaps when I was young, still under the parental shadow as it were, the second world war was too recent for a book by a German soldier, even one from the first world war, to be considered proper.

Jünger, from Hanover, joined up more or less the day the war started, joining an ancient and honourable regiment which had seen service alongside the British at Gibraltar (for which the regiment wore blue flashes) and at Waterloo - and I have only just found out that part of the army commanded by Wellington at Waterloo included around 15,000 troops from Hanover, out of a total of around 90,000. Like most serious soldiers, Jünger had proper respect for his opponents, British, French and empire. Respect which was mutual and extended to exchanges of letters with former opponents who recognised events described in the book.

He joined as a ranker, rose to be some sort of a lieutenant and was awarded the 'Pour le Mérite' after being badly wounded at the very end of the war. An award which appears to recognise sustained valour, rather than single acts of conspicuous valour, like our Victoria Cross.

He kept a diary through the war, with a first edition of this book appearing in 1920, rather before the Sassoons got underway, a book which went through lots of substantial revisions over the years, with the different revisions varying significantly in tone. This translation was made from the 1978 collected works, but there the trail goes cold. I don't know from where the collectors took their text. But despite all the revisions, it reads very fresh and raw. A record of how it was on the day. I share various snippets below.

He spoke both French and English and appeared to get on well with the French civilians among whom he lived when not in the front lines. I don't think in those days of the first war we were so hard on civilians who got along with their occupiers as we became in the second war.

He seems to have been a member of some sort of assault company (or perhaps platoon) for a good part of the war. An assault company whose job it was to smash themselves into a foothold in the opposing trenches, a foothold which could then be consolidated and extended by the troops which followed. Not quite the forlorn hopes of the 'Sharpe' stories, but certainly tendencies in that direction. I was struck by the vulnerability of a trench once you broke into it. Strong enough against a frontal attack, but very vulnerable to being rolled up once penetrated.

I was also struck by how much open ground there seemed to be between the two opposing front lines, at least most of the time. Not the fifty yards of the (excellent) model at Imperial War Museum at all (see reference 2). At one point, he passes time in a crater in this open ground, waiting for the off, by reading Tristram Shandy, a book which made it with him to the hospital following. It seems that he was accompanied, once he was an officer, by his orderly at all times, an orderly who took good care of all his personal effects. Who would have considered it a stain on his honour to have lost any of them; as bad as a fighting soldier losing a machine gun (in this war) or a colour (in the olden days).

Playing with live ordnance seems to have been a hobby with plenty of bored soldiers, some of whom made collections for their dugouts and some of whom got themselves killed or badly damaged in accidents. One, for example, wondered what would happen if he lit the green powder coming out of a partially dismantled grenade with his cigarette lighter.

He reports his surprise at gradually learning how many other soldiers were needed to support the relatively small number actually in the front line. And his irritation at the procession of specialists, this was in the early days, from HQ, advising on all aspects of trench warfare. The wire man, the dugout man, the latrine man and the drainage man.  I was reminded of our Treasury, where their front liners (in a manner of speaking) get pestered by a similar procession of specialists, all with special axes to grind - and all with special powers to interfere.

Towards the end of the war (by which time it was clear that the Germans were done for. They had run out of both men and matériel - while some of the British dugouts ran to armchairs and gramophones), he reports an assault where he was walking with his cane, his revolver and his orderly, between the two lines of advancing infantry. Lines perhaps fifty or a hundred yards apart. At one point he notices that his Iron Cross has fallen off his tunic, so he and his orderly spend some quality time scrabbling around in the mud for it, successfully, before resuming their walk.

After the war he was able to resume, or to take up, his fascination with beetles. Not a poetry man at all.

I have now turned back to Graves, back to 'Goodbye to All That', which turns out to be much more autobiographical than the German book. And having got into the trenches, it is striking how much more moaning there is. The moaning, the derelictions and defections of the rank and file. The now ludicrous behaviour of the regular officers of another ancient and honourable line regiment, the Royal Welch Fusiliers. Perhaps the difference is that Graves was in the war by accident, whereas for Jünger it turned out to be his vocation. I shall report further on Graves in due course.

Before I close, I report an association to the Boy Scouts, their second appearance in just a few days (see reference 1). In my time with them, night wide games were an important and popular part of what we did, games which often took the form of hide and seek in one of the neighbouring woods. with the older scouts searching out the younger scouts. One had to learn to be still in a rustling wood, full of strange nocturnal noises; something that was, in the beginning, quite scary. The experience did give one a little of what life in the trenches, life out in no mans' land might have been like. Perhaps that was the whole point, perhaps the militaristic associations of the Boy Scouts were no accident, if a little anachronistic by the 1960's.

And I wonder, once again, what I could have made of books such as these, as a child. What did I make of them? My dominant thought now being that it could not have been much. I would have understood the words, could probably have written sensible essays about the words, but it would all have been, essentially, childish. Would it have been of any help had I been called up a few years later - instead of going off to gap year and university? But there is another thought, the thought that what one might have felt as an impressionable child was just as important then as what one feels as a serious & sensible senior is now - just different, different and a long time ago.

The illustration is taken from the cover of an early German edition of the book, from https://www.gutenberg.org/.

PS: I think he recorded a bit of synesthesia, something which I quite often come across elsewhere, reporting the sound of a particular sort of shell as being yellow in colour. Possibly a misprint or an error, but I cannot now find the place. With gutenburg not offering an English machine readable version, that will now have to wait for a re-reading.

Reference 1: http://www.psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/trolley-36.html.

Reference 2: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=trench+experience+fil.